Bjerregaard attacks US over emission plans

LESS than a week before the Kyoto climate change conference opens in Japan, Environment Commissioner Ritt Bjerregaard has issued a final blistering attack on Washington’s ‘unambitious’ plans for reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.

In a speech to US business leaders in Brussels, she accused the US of failing to take the problem of global warming seriously. She said Washington was essentially aiming to meet its global emissions reduction target – of stabilising emissions at 1990 levels by 2012 at the latest – by buying the right to pollute from other countries.

“The US proposes that it should be allowed to meet this unambitious target through trading other countries’ reductions and doing little itself. This is the complete opposite of Rio. The US’ own forecasts, which seem to be revised upwards every month, show carbon dioxide emissions in 2000 to be 17% higher than they were in 1990 and 34% higher by 2010,” she said.

Bjerregaard – who has said repeatedly that while the EU is prepared to negotiate at Kyoto, she does not believe any deal is better than no deal at all – also pointed out that the US was likely to buy a large amount of this right to pollute from Russia and the former Soviet bloc. “In ten years, you have gone from Cold War to the US riding on a Russian hot-air balloon. I am determined to be the one who bursts that balloon,” she warned.

Meanwhile, environmental lobby group Greenpeace has welcomed Commission plans for increasing the use of renewable energy. It says the White Paper unveiled by Energy Commissioner Christos Papoutsis this week could account for one-third of the cuts in greenhouse gas the EU will be calling for at Kyoto.